<p>Hope everybody is having a great autumn 🍂 — with temperatures slated to drop next week, I suppose it's almost time for winter 🥶</p> <p>(and yes, I use em dashes. No LLM was used to write this travesty of a release post.)</p> <p>We've just dropped NodeBB v4.7.0 with some nice QoL improvements for sites federating via ActivityPub.</p> <h3>Security Fixes</h3> <p>Just a note that v4.6.3 contained a dependency upgrade to the <code>validator</code> package that fixes <a href="https://github.com/advisories/GHSA-9965-vmph-33xx" rel="nofollow ugc">CVE-2025-56200</a>. v4.7.0 contains this fix as well.</p>

<p><strong>October 2025 ForumWG Meeting</strong></p> <p>Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 17h00 to 18h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held (today) on 2 October 2025.</p> <p>Meeting link: <a href="https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg" rel="nofollow ugc">https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg</a></p> <p>This month's meeting has no set agenda. Discussions will continue re:</p> <ul> <li>FEP 7888/f228 adoption</li> <li>ongoing FEP drafts</li> <li>Context (topic/thread) deletion and moving between audiences (communities/categories)</li> </ul>

<p>We have just released v4.6.0 of NodeBB, containing fixes to our ActivityPub integration, minor fixes with SCSS, and some new functionality with topic templating.</p> <h2>:globe_with_meridians: ActivityPub Fixes</h2> <ul> <li>WordPress blogs can be properly pulled into NodeBB (via their URL) now</li> <li>Fixed an error when moving a remote topic to another category <ul> <li>This also fixed the issue where moved topics didn't update topic/post counters</li> </ul> </li></ul>

<p>At Piefed office hours, <a href="https://piefed.social/u/rimu">@<bdi>rimu@piefed.social</bdi></a> and I got to talking about what's next for Piefed and the Threadiverse WG.</p> <p>One of those things is moving stuff between communities (or in bbs parlance: moving topics between categories/forums).</p> <p>Rimu suggested we use the already-existing <code>as:Move</code> activity, sent by the community (a group actor), with <code>origin</code> and <code>target</code> set, and with <code>object</code> being the post id itself.</p>

<p><em>Apologies in advance if I misrepresented anybody or missed any crucial bits of information.</em></p> <hr /> <ul> <li>Jesse Karmani (<a href="https://mastodon.social/@jesseplusplus">@<bdi>jesseplusplus@mastodon.social</bdi></a>), Ted Thibodeau Jr. (<a href="https://mastodon.social/@TallTed">@<bdi>tallted@mastodon.social</bdi></a>, and Julian Lam (<a href="https://activitypub.space/user/julian">@<bdi>julian@activitypub.space</bdi></a>) in attendance</li> <li>Julian provided an update on adoption of FEP 7888 <ul> <li>Both Piefed and Lemmy have adopted 7888, and will begin publishing resolvable context collections in their next release</li></ul></li></ul>

<p>Hi <a href="https://mastodon.social/@pfefferle">@<bdi>pfefferle@mastodon.social</bdi></a>, I was just curious why <a href="https://activitypub.blog/">@<bdi>activitypub.blog@activitypub.blog</bdi></a> was a user and not a group on NodeBB, so I checked out its AP representation on BrowserStack.</p> <p>This stood out:</p> <pre><code> ... "generator": { "type": "Application", "implements": { "href": "https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9421", "name": "RFC-9421: HTTP Message Signatures" } }, ... </code></pre> <p>I thought "how would you be able to represent multiple implementations if <code>implements</code> is an object?</p>

<p>After years of lofi being constantly suggested to me — and to be fair, it's not all bad... I'm really enjoying <em>jazzy but not too jazzy</em> and <em>funky but not too funky</em></p>

<p>I mean... I could stand up a replacement service using NodeBB... How hard could it be?</p> <p><em>famous last words</em></p>

<p>This past June, I put together a write-up about <a href="https://community.nodebb.org/topic/18844/backfilling-conversations-two-major-approaches">two major approaches to backfilling conversations</a>. The ability to properly backfill conversations means we will be able to make major inroads toward solving the feeling that the fediverse is quiet.</p>

Monthly meetings are held on the first Thursday of each month, at 13h00 to 14h00 Eastern Time (currently 17h00 to 18h00 UTC). You can find them listed in the SocialCG Calendar. The next meeting will be held (today) on 4 September 2025. Meeting link: https://meet.jit.si/ap-forum-wg This month's meeting has no set agenda. Discussions will continue re: FEP 7888/f228 adoption and ongoing FEP drafts.

<p>Today we released v4.5.0 of NodeBB, which contains a multitude of fixes, refactors, and several new AP-related features.</p> <h2>Dependency Updates :gear:</h2> <ul> <li><code>connect-multiparty</code> was replaced with <code>multer</code> for multi-part request body handling</li> <li><code>ioredis</code> was replaced with <code>node-redis</code> as the former was deprecated with the latter being the recommended replacement</li> </ul> <h2>Chat and notification updates :left_speech_bubble:</h2> <ul> <li>Administrators are now able to toggle the chat join and leave messages in chat rooms</li> <li>Clicking "mark all read" on the notification page now marks only those matching the filter, read</li> </ul> <h2>Analytics updates :chart:</h2> <ul> <li>Page requests from ActivityPub now correctly increment the unique visitors metric</li> </ul> <h2>ActivityPub :globe_with_meridians:</h2> <ul> <li>Top-level posts (OP) federating out now contain a summary of roughly the first 500 characters, instead of sending the entire post content</li> <li>Two-way Relay support (Litepub-style)</li> <li>Auto-categorization logic for incoming post content from remote sources</li> <li>Ability to add remote categories to the forum index</li> </ul>

<p>Any chance we can get this addressed? Discourse rate limits requests heavily which hampers backfill. Essentially if I try to load a topic, Discourse will stop responding to my requests after maybe 20 requests.</p>

<p>Just an idle thought... A common UX is users copying the URL in the address bar and pasting it into their fediverse app to load it in their app.</p> <p>Right now if you copy a NodeBB topic (<code>/topic/12345</code>) and paste it into something like Mastodon, you'll get nothing because it is an ordered collection and it doesn't know how to handle it.</p> <p>But... what if I passed in a <code>preview</code> property a la <a href="https://cosocial.ca/@evan">@<bdi>evan@cosocial.ca</bdi></a>'s <a href="https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/b2b8/fep-b2b8.md" rel="nofollow ugc">b2b8</a> and it contained a <code>Note</code>? Maybe a note with a different <code>id</code>? Maybe with a <code>name</code>?</p> <p>Waiting for <a href="https://mastodon.social/@trwnh">@<bdi>trwnh@mastodon.social</bdi></a> to tell me this is a terrible idea.</p>

<p>I'm away from my desk for the next few days and so I'll likely be posting more open ended discussion questions.</p> <p>Recently I've been thinking more about the decline of forums of yesteryear and how hosting a forum has always been rather niche.</p> <p>That got me thinking about how one of Reddit's "killer features" was that just anybody could create a subreddit. The same could be said about Facebook groups as well.</p> <p>You don't get that with forums, only the admin can create categories/forums, and by extension that usually limited the rise of general interest boards, and more towards niche topic-focused boards. It also meant that basically every board had a "general discussion" board or "random" board.</p> <p>Would there be interest in NodeBB supporting something like this... Basically, the ability for anyone to set up a category and instantly moderate it, and build your own sub community inside a community? Does this <em>ruin</em> the magic of forums?</p>

<p>Reflecting on <a href="http://justbsocial.eu" rel="nofollow ugc">justbsocial.eu</a>'s recent launch, I wonder whether <a href="https://mastodon.social/@anewsocial">@<bdi>anewsocial@mastodon.social</bdi></a> is thinking about creating a bridge as a service product to connect existing social networks to the fediverse.</p> <p>Having them start from scratch is a barrier in many ways!</p> <p><a href="https://mastodon.social/@quillmatiq">@<bdi>quillmatiq@mastodon.social</bdi></a></p>

<p>Host: "Let's State the obvious, Canada is not in Europe, would it even be possible for this country to join the EU?"</p> <p>Frederic Menard (political scientist in Montreal): "In theory, yes, and let me get an obstacle out of the way: Oftentimes people will say ‘Canada is not in Europe and to be part of the European Union it says that you have to be a European country’ — which is true — except that being a European country is not defined anywhere."</p> <p>So we can join because of a technicality? Excellent.</p>